This essay makes the argument that political communication researchers would be well served to look to communication theories developed in other communication subfields as a means by which to advance a number of different research agendas. A series of events or issues that came to light during the 2008 Presidential election are highlighted and specific theories from communication subfields, other than political communication, are isolated in order to show the utility these theories would bring to political communication scholarship. Five communication subfields are focused on in this essay: Interpersonal communication, persuasion, communication information technology, media effects, and strategic communication. The 2008 election topics covered in this essay include face-to-face political discussions of race and gender, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, YouTube, Saturday Night Live, and lifestyle political campaigning.

The full article can be found here.

APA Citation: Holbert, R. L. & Geidner, N. (2009). The 2008 election: Highlighting the need to explore additional communication sub-fields to advance political communication. Communication Studies, 60, 344-358

1) YouTube and other online video sharing – Unlike three television channel media system of the 1950’s, YouTube allows the user to have a seemingly endless amount of choice in their media experience. The rise of this type of media creates a number of important areas of future communication research.

a) Will online video add to theories of media fragmentation put forth by scholars, such as Sunstein (2002)? Communication researchers must begin to understand how individuals use these new media to gain information. Are they using it just to reinforce there own views or are they using it to gain new information about different/opposing views?

b) What is the environment of the online video? It is widely speculated that YouTube is driving by bitterly partisan videos, which deal with topics of a superficial nature. Like the USENET before it, content analyzes should be performed to extend this past simple speculation.

2) Datamining, content specialization, and targeting – Unexamined in most research on Internet and politics is a formal discussion of message targeting. More easily than with any media before it, the Internet allows the message creator to gather, store and access vast amounts of information about the reader/user. This information can be used to target messages for the specific user. The most famous example of this being the suggestion engine on Amazon.com. There is no reason this type of targeting couldn’t be apply to the political realm.

In the 2008 election, nearly all the candidate’s websites encouraged the user to give up personal information (e.g., e-mail and zip code). Some of the campaign’s use of this information might be benign or even helpful for the user (e.g., sending an e-mail when there is a local campaign event), but it could be much more. The candidates could use the information to reshape their whole website to highlight the issues important to the user and hide the issues unimportant to the user. This presents a number of ethical questions, which need to be examined, and presents a number of communication research issues and oppurtunities.

a) The ability to create many different specialized, database driven sites creates a huge problem for any type of systematic content analysis.

b) The effects of targeting on political outcomes in the online realm need to be understood better.

3) Social media – With the rise of Web 2.0, there has also been an increase in the ability to socialize on the Internet. This online socialization creates an interesting problem for communication research. Basically, we don’t know where to place these new communication technologies on the scale from intrapersonal to mass communication. For example, YouTube as mention above presents a number of problems for comm research, but then by adding the social element it gets even more muddy. For example, YouTube allows people to post response videos. If the user watches a video and then a response video are they watching two instances of mass communication or are they witnessing deliberation between two individuals. Social media (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, etc) were used extensively throughout the 2008 election.

One way to understand their effects on political outcomes is to understand what kind of communication is occurring. Another way is to isolate an important variable which could mediate the effects of the media usage on political outcomes. One such variable could be connection or emotional attachment to the issue group, candidate, or online environment being examined. By isolating connection and examining how it varies in relation to media usage we can indirectly understand the effects of those media without having to limit our analysis to only the mass comm or interpersonal comm aspects of the media.

So that is what I am thinking for now. These are only idea starters and should not be assumed to be anything more than that. If anyone has any other thoughts or ideas it would be greatly appreciated.